As telecom providers race to deliver services with increased speed and agility, industry analyst Infonetics expects the carrier market for SDN and NFV technologies to soar from $500 million last year to more than $11 billion by 2018.

At its 2014 Collaboration Summit in Los Angeles this week, Cisco highlighted some of the hottest new additions to its collaboration portfolio, in addition to a number of new partner tools and promotions to help bring those solutions to market. Here are eight products, tools and incentives set to shake up the Cisco collaboration channel.

Cisco Tuesday continued its midmarket collaboration offensive with the launch of the Business Edition 6000S, a new collaboration platform it says is significantly less expensive and complex to deploy than comparable Cisco offerings.

A recent survey gauges how Cisco solution providers feel about everything from the networking giant's Intercloud strategy to the eventual retirement of CEO John Chambers. Here are eight key take-aways.

While Cisco's first-quarter earnings were better than expected, its outlook for Q2 was lower than analyst projections, causing its shares to slip in after-hours trading Wednesday. Cisco CFO Frank Calderoni, meanwhile, is stepping down.

Craig Schlagbaum, vice president of indirect channels at Comcast Business, said in an interview with CRN that IT solution providers now account for roughly 60 percent of Comcast's overall indirect channel.